Christine La Monte

Christine La Monte, director/producer and former film studio marketing executive, is the founder and president of LA MONTE PRODUCTIONS. Her most recent project, VIVA VERDI!, is a documentary that she is producing with director/producer Yvonne Russo, about life inside Casa Verdi, the home that Giuseppe Verdi built in Milan for retired opera singers in 1896. Other projects in various stages of production/development include a film based on the critically acclaimed legal thriller, JUSTICE DEFERRED by Len Williams; a documentary, THE OTHER SIDE OF 90, which she is directing and producing; RED HOT MAMAS scripted by Gary Goldstein; and MAMA SAID scripted by Barbara Bottner and Arlene Sidaris. In 2008, La Monte produced/executive produced the award-winning short film DANDELION DHARMA, which has played in over 20 film festivals around the world, and is found in the Shorts International/iTunes catalogue.

Her theatrical directing work includes the Screen Actors Guild’s “A Heart United” with Sharon Lawrence and Jo Beth Williams, and “The Angina Monologues” with Brenda Strong and Stephen Collins, staged at Maria Shriver’s Long Beach Women’s Conference. She produced the theatrical production of Three Grooms And A Bride, written by Gary Goldstein and starring Anne De Salvo at the Coast Playhouse in West Hollywood, and was a producer of the syndicated television talk show, MARILU, starring Marilu Henner.

Prior to establishing her own production company, La Monte spent over twenty years in New York and Los Angles as a film studio marketing executive at Universal, Disney and at Orion Pictures where she played a key role in the marketing campaigns for the back-to-back Academy Award-winning films DANCES WITH WOLVES and THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS. She began her film career in exhibition as a marketing executive at Sack Theatres in Boston. As a strategic film marketer, she served a five-year stint as Executive Vice President of the Motion Picture Division at Rogers & Cowan; was Executive VP of Corporate/Media Relations at TV3 New Zealand; and worked as a marketing consultant for the historic film studio, CineCitta in Rome, Italy.

A member of both the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, where she has served on the Foreign Language Film Selection Committee for over twenty years, and the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, La Monte is a past faculty member of New York’s School of Visual Art where she initiated “The Dusty Awards,” an on-going annual film festival/award ceremony of student short films recently celebrating its 25th anniversary. She served as a jury member on the 2014 Doc Challenge, and has guest-lectured at UCLA and USC. A long-standing member of Women In Film, and the Alliance of Women Directors, she is on the board of the University of Buffalo’s Dean’s Advisory Council, and served as Producer and Workshop Presenter of UB and Variety ’s UBC2C HOLLYWOOD, an entertainment/media symposium for aspiring filmmakers. In 2009 La Monte received UB’s Distinguished Alumni Dean’s Award; she was featured as one of the outstanding executives in marketing/publicity in the Sixth Annual issue of the Hollywood Reporter’s Women In Entertainment. She is a past board member of the Los Angeles Ballet, as well as the non-profit, Events of the Heart. La Monte divides her time between Los Angeles and Rome with her author husband, Len Williams.